Avalanche Dangers are High Across all of Colorado
By Steve Casimiro on February 6th, 2013
A college student was killed by a slide this past weekend outside Silverton, which was pounded by snow all last week, racking up over three feet — a lot for the Rocky Mountains. The bummer was that freshies came on top of an old crust, preceded by rain to 8,000 feet. You couldn’t manufacture a much worse sliding surface, and a large avalanche slid down the face of the popular South Diamond backcountry skiing area of Cameron Pass west of Fort Collins on Saturday afternoon, injuring a man. The slide was about 1,000 feet across and ran about 300 vertical feet. “There’s definitely a couple of lucky folks who I hope went out and bought lottery tickets, because that’s not usually the kind of thing you walk away from,” said Scott Toepfer of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. Two skiers were stranded by that slide, and it took them 12 hours to get back to safety. But they were relatively lucky, with avalanche danger “considerable” across much of the entire state. Via Coloradoan.
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Tags: Skiing